Kids: 'Call 911 - driver is crazy'

By This Daily News Investigative Team series was reported, WRITTEN STAFF WRITERS GREG B. SMITH, ROBERT GEARTY, BENJAMIN LESSER and Assistant Managing Editor RICHARD T. PIENCIAK

Mar 20, 2007 | 4:00 AM

On a rainy morning last June, students from Pathways College Prep school in Queens were on a field trip to Manhattan Criminal Court to learn about the justice system.

Thanks to their bus driver - who got arrested on the way - they never got to court, but, boy, did they get a lesson on how things work at the courthouse.

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On the trip from St. Albans, driver Ronald Eldridge began claiming that people were making fun of him. He and a teacher began arguing, and the driver told her he could hear everything because there were cameras and microphones planted throughout the bus.

When teacher Alecia Miller used her cell phone to call the school to request another driver for the trip home, eldridge told her to put away the phone.

"He said he was in control of everything on the bus and said that if he wanted to, he could ram the bus into a wall and kill everybody," Miller was quoted as saying in an internal department of education report on the June 7 incident.

As Miller was calling the police, some ninth-graders in the back of the bus scribbled, "CALL 911 - driver is CRAZY" on notepads and held the signs to the windows for passersby to see.

Four officers from the 9th Precinct pulled the Amboy Bus Co. bus over on Houston st. in lower Manhattan. When one of the officers boarded, eldridge refused to answer her questions, or turn off the ignition, the report states. He was arrested and taken away in handcuffs.

The bus driver made it to Manhattan Criminal Court, but the students did not.

A week later, investigator dennis Harrington of the department of education's Office of Pupil Transportation asked Eldridge to explain his comments about cameras and microphones being on his bus.

According to Harrington's report, eldridge replied, "THEY could hear everything that was said on the bus because of the microphones. He could hear it also and knew people on the bus were talking about him."

Harrington asked eldridge who "THEY" were.

"He said he didn't know, but he knew THEY were there," Harrington wrote.

When the investigator asked where "THEY" were, Eldridge "pointed up at the ceiling."

Asked again who THEY were, Eldridge replied, "They're the people at the other end of the microphones." in his final report, Harrington provided an understated analysis of Eldridge's state of mind: "He knows that THEY are the people on the other end of the micro-phones, but does not know where the other end of the microphones are. i interpreted Mr. eldridge's statements to be that of a man who may be imagining that people are talking about him, when in fact they are not."

Harrington recommended that eldridge undergo a psychiatric exam. On July 7, a month after the incident, he was decertified as a bus driver. eldridge was charged with six counts of endangering the welfare of a child and one count of unlawful imprisonment in the second degree, according to the Manhattan district attorney's office.

But on Feb. 20, the charges were dismissed and the case sealed. Prosecutors were forced to drop the charges because Miller had been uncooperative, according to a spokeswoman for the DA's office.

"That's not true," a shocked Miller told the daily News. she said she had taken a day off from school to attend a court hearing Oct. 31, only to have the proceeding adjourned.

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"They said, 'We will be in touch,' but that was the last word," she continued.

According to a transcript of the hearing, Assistant DA David Smith told Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Alexander Jeong he was not ready to proceed. Smith also explained that there was a plea bargain offer on the table: Eldridge could plead guilty to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct - only a violation and not a crime - in exchange for a sentence of five days of community service. Eldridge declined the offer; his Legal Aid attorney sandy Zucker added without elaborating, "There are just some employment issues that he needs to verify before taking the dis-position."

Records show that the case was adjourned to Jan. 4 and again to Feb. 20, when it was dismissed.

The DA's spokeswoman declined to respond to Miller's contention that she had been cooperative.

Miller said her students had gone to Manhattan to watch a criminal trial because they were reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" - the Harper Lee classic about racism in a small southern town where a black man is wrong-ly convicted of raping a white woman.

"I was thinking i was in a safe environment [on the bus], but that was not the case," she said.

After the dismissal, eldridge declined comment. Outside the courthouse, he threw a cane at a News photographer and chased her back into the building.